Question:
My Rosie has had diarrhea for a few months. I wrote the previous posting
"cronic diarrhea. help!" Well, I took her to the vet again today. He thinks
she has a food allergy. Any information anyone has to share about this I would
appreciate.
Answer:
The first thing would do would be to get her on a premium lamb and rice
diet, make sure there is NO corn or wheat. I really like Nutro Natural
Choice brands, Professional is good, NutraNuggets and Eukanuba may be some
to look into to. If that doesn't help, your vet may want to offer a
prescription diet, I think they are duck and potato or venison and potato or
something...they are very pricey though, but for a dog, cost shouldn't
matter. ~:^)
I'm also concerned that having had diarreaha this long, she may be
dehydrated. Did the vet talk to you about that? She should probably get
some Pedialyte or Gaterodae. They do have a electrolite solution for dogs,
but it's hard to find. Lamb would not be a good idea. While it was an effective choice in 1962 when
it was first introduced, it is now the fourth most common food allergen.
Talk to your vet about a diet composed of sub 6000 Dalton proteins and see
if that works. If it does you will then know that food allergy is the
problem. You can then take the next step in determining what the animal is
allergic to. The most common allergies in dogs are in order: Beef
Wheat
Dairy These three alone comprise 78% of all food allergies in dogs.
Lamb
Chicken
Egg These three comprise approximately another 18% of all food
allergies.
Corn is rarely involved at less than 1% of all food allergies in dogs. Rice
falls just under corn.
That's very interesting. I have a dog, that if fed a "regular" food, will
turn hot pink (her belly and ears). On the Lamb and Rice (Nutro Natural
Choice Lite) she does just fine. I can always tell when she's been in the
cat food...her skin tells me. At four months of age (at the time on a
chicken and rice diet), her ears swelled up like water ballons. At first,
the vet just 'tacked' them, that didn't work. Then they had to actually sew
the two sides of the ear together so they couldn't swell (then she had to
wear a bandage "hat" for about a month...now her ears are stiff and
bent...adds a little character). The vet said it was due to food allergies
and suggested a L & R diet, which, as I said, has worked wonders. The first diet produced for food allergies was Hill's Prescription Diet
Lamb and Rice. These two ingredients were chosen in 1962 because they were
not then used in any commercial foods. It could have been gophers and
bananas (being facetious here), but lamb and rice were more available at the
time. This diet was never designed to be allergy free, it was simply
designed to allow veterinarians to have a unique set of proteins to which
animals had not previously been exposed. If the symptoms cleared up the vet
could then reach a diagnosis of food intolerance or allergy. The next step
was to add back various ingredients and determine what the animal was really
intolerant of. Most pet owners who got relief from the lamb and rice product
were not about to add further ingredients and cause the problem to start
again. As a result the use of lamb and rice got a reputation of being good
for food allergies. It worked fine for 30 years until every food
manufacturer brought out lamb and rice products. The next step was using
other alternative unique proteins, venison, rabbit, kangaroo, potato etc.
Over time each of these will become useless as well. The next generation of
food allergy diets avoids the possibility of triggering an immune response
by breaking the proteins down to a size too small to trigger the antigen
response on the mast cells.
Your veterinarian may have been "old school" and thinking lamb and rice
was still the best solution. In your case the allergy was to something other
than lamb and rice. What that might be is still unknown. Most likely
culprits will be beef, dairy and wheat.
